Yet I am a very nostalgic person--whether it be my New Jersey working-class upbringing, 1970s music, the American Basketball Association, the New York Mets, or the destruction of local communities at the hands of global capitalism.

Over at The New York Times, Coontz reflects on the disease of nostalgia. Here is a taste:

In personal life, the warm glow of nostalgia amplifies good memories and
minimizes bad ones about experiences and relationships, encouraging us
to revisit and renew our ties with friends and family. It always
involves a little harmless self-deception, like forgetting the pain of
childbirth.

In society at large, however, nostalgia can distort our understanding of
the world in dangerous ways, making us needlessly negative about our
current situation.

Nineteenth-century Americans were extremely worried, the historian Susan
Matt points out, about the incidence of nostalgia, which was the term
used to describe homesickness
in those days. According to physicians of the era, acute nostalgia led
to “mental dejection,” “cerebral derangement” and sometimes even death.
The only known cure was for the afflicted individual to go home, and if
that wasn’t possible, the sufferer was seriously out of luck.